Fans and Friends do the coolest things...

[seawasp]

Keith Morrison, a reader, geologist, and hobbyist with modeling software, asked permission (as if it was needed! But it was very polite) to use the Nike as a practice model for him to get used to some new software. I naturally gave permission.

I didn't expect either the speed or quality of the results, I must confess; when I think of "practice" work I, well, think of something like what I produced from Visio; a serviceable drawing, but nothing to write home about.

Keith's work is... well, gorgeous, as you can see in my Boundary images subfolder in my gallery. Multiple angles of Nike, plus two showing the huge ship in orbit (and departing from orbit, firing main engines) around Earth and one for arrival at Mars.

He's now working on the Odin and the Nebula Storm, two vessels that play a critical role in the sequel to Boundary, Threshold.

Comments

[argonel.livejournal.com]

The textured rendering still look pretty good. I'm not as excited by the untextured models, but you definately know your way around a modeling package.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Actually, they're all textured exactly the same. All the images were rendered in a few minutes of each other--well, except the Mars one, which I did the next day--without touching the texture or even the model. I rotated the camera, sun and other props around it. What you're seeing is the result of glare off the surface material, different angles of incidence, and tweaking the sunlight, darkening it from pure white to gray. There's also a subtle (and quite fake, for space) ambient light.

For some real life examples showing the same thing (bright light washing out detail), see
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-100/lores/s100e5239.jpg
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-104/lores/iss002-422-025.jpg

Notice how where the Canadarm is in direct sunlight everything is washed out compared to when it's illuminated by reflected light off the station or the Earth, allowing much more detail to be visible.

People have been trained in seeing 3D and model spacecraft not to see the light bloom for natural overexposure because most models aren't white or pure metallic and the lights are tweaked for the beauty shots. When they see a (mostly) realistic version of the light effects, it looks "fake".

This just all goes to show, of course, that when doing 3D the modeling is often the easy part.